Lecture: A Review of Study (1964)

Now, if you know education – and you know our technology of education now – you will see at once exactly what must have happened. Way back here in kindergarten or someplace the Communist love of the reevaluation of words caught him. The favorite trick of the Communist is not to change anybody’s vocabulary but to make it mean something else. They change the meaning of words so therefore everything sounds familiar. The next thing you know a person finds that the word means something else entirely different. I’ll give you in lump example of this: Orwell’s 1984, wonderful changes of semantics, the change of meanings, of words which went through 1984. “Freedom is slavery,” you know?

Well, even Roosevelt was at it. We had freedom for a long time. Everybody knew what “freedom” meant. Roosevelt, he made it “freedom from.” You had to be freedom from something. That was what – the freedom we were now fighting for, we were fighting for “freedoms from.” Well, that’s an interesting way of looking at it. “Freedom from.” Well, that means you must be fighting it so you couldn’t possibly be free of it. “Freedom” means “freedom.” It doesn’t mean standing up against something and pushing it away from you or worrying about will it catch up to you again, or something like this, or working day and night so that it won’t happen to you. That’s not freedom.

So, here’s a change of semantics. Now, the Russian, of course had this entire Asian population, this huge mass of people, 200 million – one of the bigger populations of Earth in one country, all divided up into different lingual groups and different customs and so forth – and he moved in on them and then he had to change everything in order to get it all lined up and get them to work together at all and he had to reevaluate all their words. So that in 1964 we find he’s lost his revolution. How did he lose his revolution? Well, he trains several thousand young people to take over the c and they’re going to be the executives and the big shots on the project and they’re go – they too are going to be able to drive around in Model T Fords. And at the end of the on – the – job training they all leave the Pujas River Project. That means he’s going to run out of people to run things.

Material which we’ve got right now in Scientology, oddly enough, was of great interest to the old man Stalin himself because he smelled that it might exist in the studies which I was doing and was – I was in contact with Amtorg in 1938.

And the whole line of – is, “How do you evaluate the relative ability of a person to work? How can you find out which person will produce more than which person?” And I was engaged in a study of that at that time and had some rather revelatory information regarding it. I was extremely pleased with this information and it got noised about the Explorers Club.1 The next thing you know, I was backing up at a mile a minute trying to keep my foot off that boat of going to Russia and talk to Stalin about it.

He had problems. He had worries in 1938 – plenty of worries. He was looking for help from anyplace. But where was his missing technology? The missing technology was “How do you get people to understand something and how do you get people to do things?” Those were his areas of no comprehension. How do you get people to understand things, how do you get people to do things? Well, he thought he had solved “How do you get people to do things.” “You set up enough machine guns in front of enough walls and give them enough examples, they will work.” Only you can’t keep it – keep at it forever that way. That’ll play out sooner or later.

Now, when you start working that along an educational line, you run out of educated people fast. They just get stupider and stupider and stupider and stupider. So that I think that the way the leisure class and the upper class was wiped out in England and suborned was not through any political revolution. I just think they educated them to death. I think actually they got too stupid to hold their position. Something to think about, huh? I mean, as a class they were just educated to death. Everybody had to go to college.Of course, what did this leave? This left a bunch of commoners around who didn’t have to go to college, so it didn’t matter about birth or anything else. It left these boys who were on the outside smarter than the guys who were on the inside so the guys who were on the inside lost. I mean, it doesn’t take much to understand that. That must have been what happened.

So we can make a further point; we can make a further point here. We could say, then, that the continuation of a culture is entirely dependent upon possessing a technology of study. Russia is going to lose hers!2

Notes

According to Barefaced Messiah, Hubbard began writing for John W. Campbell in 1938 (p. 78), and joined the Explorer’s Club in 1940 (p. 85). ↩